


No Place To Call Home Any More

by matrixrefugee



Category: Torchwood
Genre: M/M, Please Don't Kill Me, Post Children of Earth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 01:59:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17572142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matrixrefugee/pseuds/matrixrefugee
Summary: Jack has barely had a place he can call home, but after he loses the last place he considered homelike, he finds a warm reminder of it...





	No Place To Call Home Any More

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](https://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/profile)[fic_promptly](https://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/)'s [Torchwood, Jack Harkness, he can never truly go home.](http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/14742.html?thread=797590#cmt797590). Set after Children of Earth.

He'd never felt truly at home, not for some time: the last time he'd really felt that warm feeling of contentment and security and togetherness, deep in his heart and soul, had been in the colony where he'd grown up, that far away planet in a now far-off galaxy. His parents, his little brother, their colony-mates in the wing of the communal dwelling where they lived and had their hearth. Sure, they had their upsets as usually happen when a number of people live that close together and they often had to hunker down when they had some unwelcome visitors, but to a boy that felt more like an adventure.

At least until that fateful day when he lost half his family in one day.

And yet, he'd felt flashes of that feeling of familiarity over his long life; never the full compliment, but close enough that it would suffice. The first time he felt it, he had gotten himself picked up by a madman who traveled in a blue box, who with his lovely companion in the Union Jack shirt, had plucked him away from certain death.

He felt it again, after a while -- make that a hundred twenty some-odd years of getting the initial capture and coercion when the original Torchwood bagged him -- while working alongside the team he had gathered after the Battle at Canary Wharf and after his predecessor had gone murderously destructive. The closeness, the camaraderie, they felt less like a team than like a family. The very fact that holding an image of them in his mind and heart during the Year That Wasn't had to mean something, that they meant more to each other than sharing the same work space and the same job.

One reminder of that home he had left behind had caught up with him, and the part of him that had not yet quite shaken the last of the sands of the Boeshane Peninsula from his feet had hoped to make another home with him. But instead, his own brother had turned on him, nearly destroyed him, took down a third of his team before he could be stopped.

He had managed to pull what remained of his Torchwood family back together. And then he had that brief return to the blue box, summoned to help in the effort to bring Earth back to it's rightful orbit around Sol, a return to home that meant a reunion with the others in the Family of Time, the aunts and cousins he had yet to meet as well as the ones he knew and had traveled with.

A family come home to their crazy traveling house, bringing the rest of the human family back to their rightful home in the sky...

And then it all went to hell: a threat to the children of Earth had ended with his house destroyed and then his home broken. He could no longer stay on Earth, and so he turned his back on Earth, back to wandering the space-time continuum.

Anywhere but the planet where he first saw the light of day. He had nothing to go back to there, and little left on Earth. He went in search of the one who had helped him find a home again, but could not find him, as if the universe had drawn the Doctor away from him.

For that reason, he had bottomed out at a dive bar on a space station, trying to drown his sorrows in hypervodka, though he had long ago found his sorrows floated and his senses did not dull so easily as they used to, thanks to his unique abilities as a fixed point in time. Still, it gave him something to do.

And then he glimpsed a piece of home across the bar, the one who had given him a home, nudging him towards another lonely soul -- a young midshipman looking for another ship -- who reminded him of home...


End file.
